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We leafletted at U of Illinois in Champaign today. We handed out
600 copies in about 3 hours. People seemed very receptive & some
were eager to get the info. We also restocked [the restaurant] Veg
Express with another box of Why Vegan.M&J, Chicago, IL, 2/22/02

Thank you for sending me the very powerful Meet Your Meat,
which I am very grateful to have to educate other people who are
totally unaware of modern agribusiness. It is an excellent video.

I have distributed the first box of Why Vegan? and I am glad
to say that they are doing well. Only one business threw them away.
I got permission but her coworkers did not approve. [To avoid this
problem, it's best to get permission from a manager -ed.] I am glad
to say it was only some ten copies. I was still annoyed that they
did not save them for me. In warm weather I will be distributing
outside on campus.

You will never hear from me, "I think I have a box of them
somewhere here." As I said, I carry them with me in my bag to
give out to people who ask about my buttons. It is a good segue into
letting them read for themselves.DK, Madison, WI, 2/22/02

I think Why Vegan? is the best tool for vegan activism, ever.
A thorough, colourful booklet says so much more than a blurb on a
bumper sticker. I've passed them out at my military high school (!),
and I already know of half a dozen who are going vegan, and many
others who want to give it a try.KF, 2/21/02

News & Announcements

Placing Orders

Please make sure that you not only complete your online
donation, but that you go back and submit the actual order. These
are two separate pages. If you do not get a response via email saying
your order has been received, we didn't receive it.

In the Mood for a Road Trip?

USDA Relies On Foreign Inspections

Excerpt from "Alabama Egg Processing Plant Destroyed
by Fire"

Egg Industry Magazine
February 2002 issue; page 1

An early morning fire on January 3 at Brock Miracle Eggs, Fairview,
Alabama, destroyed the office, processing plant and one of five poultry
houses.
According to owner Del Brock, 140,000 laying hens were killed in
the fire. The laying hens in the five 535-foot chicken houses were
capable of laying 400,000 eggs every day.

"Our first order of business is to get this debris removed
as quickly as possible and continue to get as much product out as
we can," Brock said.

An Example of an Anti-AR Message

New CD version of Meet Your Meat & Pig Investigation

A Note Regarding Peter Singer

by Matt Ball

In last
week's Spam, we referenced an appearance
by Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, on the newsmagazine
60 Minutes II. Any mention of Professor Singer is sure
to bring in responses, and this time was no different.

One criticism about Professor Singer that Vegan Outreach receives
is that he should never have written about medical ethics, specifically
about how to approach life and death decisions regarding infants.
The critics claim that it distracts from the more important issue
of animal liberation. An alternative way to look at it is that people
trying to end third-world poverty (an effort which Singer also advocates)
might wish that Professor Singer had never written Animal Liberation,
as it distracts from what they consider to be the most important
issue.

Of course, a cost/benefit analysis can be done on the relative merits
of avoiding certain topics vs. professional advancement and fame
(e.g., would footage of factory farms have been shown in prime time
on 60 Minutes II if not for Professor Singer's other controversial
writings? Would he have been given a chair at Princeton?).

I understand the desire for simplicity and focus, but I, for one,
am glad that someone has had the courage and intellectual fortitude
to start with ethical first principles and unblinkingly "ride
the escalator of ethics." It has been a great service to the
advancement of human thought.

The Roundup

Answer this one question, and the primary problem facing America's
animal rights movement will be solved: how can we bring the slaughter
of ten billion animals a year into public consciousness? There's
the famous quote from Stalin that, "One death is a tragedy.
A million is a statistic." But what about a billion? Or ten
billion? The numbers are so huge that they defy comparison. Comparison,
that is, to everything but the holocaust.

I was raised Jewish, and lost my grandfather in Auschwitz. I think
that comparing the American meat industry to Nazi Germany's final
solution is outrageous. Very few animal rights activists have dared
to do this publicly, and for good reason. If there's anything the
holocaust teaches us, it's that more than ten million people died
one-at-a-time in unspeakable ways. Their memory should be sacred.
And to use the horrors of concentration camps to advance an unrelated
cause, however noble, is to defile the memory of the holocausts
victims.

In January, Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka was published.
This book examines the linkage between America's meat industry and
Germany's concentration camps. It is certain to offend. I'd known
about the writing of this book for over a year, and I was frankly
dreading its publication. But even though I've always thought it
counterproductive to mention death camps and slaughterhouses in the
same breath, there are admittedly a couple obvious connections. Both
slaughterhouses and death camps are designed to kill, and to kill
in large numbers. And both types of operations are well known as
being horrifying places. But if the connections end there, the linkage
between the two ought not be presented to the general public. After
all, the desire to rid the earth of Jews has very little to do with
the desire to put sausage on the table.

Eternal Treblinka shows that death camps and factory farms
have powerful links that extend beyond their purpose to carry out
mass slaughter. Patterson's argument is two-pronged. First, he asserts
that industrial-era technologies made both death camps and slaughterhouses
possible. He follows up this assertion with a far bolder claim: that
much of the thinking behind Hitler's final solution persists today
in the treatment of "food" animals.

The technological evolution of both slaughterhouses and death camps
is deeply intertwined. Patterson shows how the first modern slaughterhouses
led to factory assembly lines, which in turn begat Hitler's death
camps. Henry Ford was the essential intermediary in this story. Patterson
writes that, "Not only did he develop the assembly line method
the Germans used to kill the Jews, but he launched a vicious anti-Semitic
campaign that helped make the holocaust happen."

A notorious anti-Semite, Ford came away deeply impressed after witnessing
industrialized animal slaughter at Chicago's Union Stockyards. Ford
realized that the conveyor-belt strategy used to disassemble animals
could be applied toward the assembly of his Model T automobiles.
As Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, Ford was one of his most powerful
American supporters. Ford exported money, technology, and propaganda
into Nazi hands, cementing Hitler's authority and sealing the fate
of the Jews. Patterson quotes Hitler as saying, "I regard Henry
Ford as my inspiration." And in 1938, Ford became one of just
four foreigners to receive (and accept) the Nazi's highest honor
for non-Germans.

Patterson convincingly describes how the same early twentieth-century
techniques developed for assembly lines were carefully applied to
exterminating Jews. He also examines how the philosophy behind slaughtering
animals was appropriated to exterminate the Jews. In great detail,
Patterson shows how the Jews were consistently called "pigs,"
"hogs," "vermin," and other animal names. As
with animals entering a slaughterhouse, Jews were kept crowded and
filthy and frightened. Doing this served two purposes. First, keeping
the Jews in a supremely vulnerable state kept them compliant. Many
did exactly as they were told, not realizing the merciless fate that
awaited. Second, by keeping Jews in such foul conditions, death camp
workers were unlikely to feel empathy. The conditions the Jews were
forced to endure were a perfect match for the subhuman names they
were called.

Perhaps most chillingly, Patterson discusses the similarities between
the corral leading to the kill floor and the ramps leading to the
gas chambers. America's top slaughterhouse designer calls her path
to the kill floor the "stairway to heaven." Similarly,
at the Treblinka death camp, SS soldiers called the passage to the
gas chambers the "road to heaven."

In so many areas of life, mediocrity is good enough. But if excellence
is ever a moral imperative, it should be demanded of somebody who
dares to write about the connections between genocide and animal
slaughter. In every respect, Patterson has proven himself up to the
task. For such a horrifying book, Eternal Treblinka is beautifully
written. And Patterson's research is first-rate. The author of a
previous book about the holocaust, Patterson has obviously spent
years reading the literature on this subject. His research into historical
and modern methods of meat production is similarly extensive. I regard
this as one of the finest animal rights books ever written.

But what of the animals? Can reading Eternal Treblinka lead
to change? By reading this book, I've come to understand the origin
and structure of the meat industry to a degree I've never before
appreciated. Patterson has thought deeply and written expertly about
this subject, and I feel my activism will always be the better for
reading this book. Eternal Treblinka is the darkest and saddest book
I've ever read, but it's strengthened what I have to offer as a writer
and an activist. Thanks to Patterson's superb work, the profound
connections between the meat industry and Auschwitz, the place my
grandfather died, are now visible for anybody brave enough to look.

Vegan Outreach is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the suffering of farmed animals by promoting informed, ethical eating.